Tom DiLorenzo on Donald Trump's admiration for William McKinley

Lo and behold, President Trump has discovered a new political hero to idolize: President (1897-1901) William McKinley of Ohio whose election was orchestrated by the wealthiest man in Ohio (and the U.S.), John D. Rockefeller, who ran the Standard Oil Company out of his Cleveland home.  McKinley is President Trump’s new hero because he was known as a congressman as the most rabid Republican party protectionist in a party that was founded on the principle of protectionism (and of corporate welfare and a national bank) in the mid 1850s.  The 1890 McKinley tariff was named after Representative William McKinley because of his notoriety as a tool of the Northern manufacturing plutocracy.  It created the highest average tariff rate in U.S. history up to that point and targeted such items as wool and tin with especially high tariff taxes, some exceeding 100 percent.  It caused such a spike in the prices of such items that in the next election the Republican party was wiped out, losing both houses of Congress and the White House, with the Democrat party having a 2-1 advantage in the House.  Free trader Grover Cleveland became president.  McKinley himself was defeated and was installed by the Rockefeller machine as the governor of Ohio. 

The Rockefeller machine got McKinley elected president in 1896.  One of his first “accomplishments” in 1897 was to repeat the political disaster of the McKinley Tariff Tax by signing the Dingley Tariff Tax which created another highest average tariff rate in history.  The people be damned; by that point the Republican party had created a government by the Northern corporate plutocracy, for the corporate plutocracy, of the corporate plutocracy.  President Trump’s kind of people.

McKinley was also a notorious imperialist, waging an imperialistic war against Spain (the Spanish-American War) during which the U.S. government conquered Cuba, Puerto Rico, and the Philippines, leading the great Yale University libertarian scholar William Graham Sumner to author his famous article, “The Conquest of the United States by Spain.”  The Spanish-American War, Sumner wrote, turned the U.S. into an imperialist power, just like the thoroughly corrupt and bankrupted Spanish empire.  (All empires, by the way, view their populations as good for two things: as taxpayers and cannon fodder in the empire’s wars.  Fast forward to today’s world and the incoming president is proposing a takeover of Greenland, part of Panama, and Canada “for national security reasons.”

~ Thomas DiLorenzo, "How the McKinley Tariff Almost Destroyed the Republican Party," LewRockwell.com, December 31, 2024